How Daniel Pinkwater became my personal guru

Daniel Pinkwater, 72, is a onetime Fumetti model, an art therapy school dropout, a former Zen Buddhist, a former cult member, a former NPR commentator, a former sculptor, the alleged destructor of Harvey Kurtzman’s Help! Magazine, a gentleman farmer, a decent chess player, a bad minder of friends’ girlfriends, a surrealist, a bohemian, and an old schoolmate of Errol Flynn’s son. He looks like a bald Allan Sherman, if that means anything to you. (It doesn’t mean much to him. “I do remember Alan Sherman. Mildly amusing,” he told me.) His father was a Jewish gangster from Warsaw, about his mother he has mostly bad things to say, his wife Jill Pinkwater is a writer, and he has the greatest radio voice you’ve ever heard, Carl Kasell included.